CON_TEXT was the programme focus of Lettrétage in 2017 – a series of events that sought to rethink and explore the ‘reading’ format. Each CON_TEXT event was jointly developed and staged by an author and an artist from a different discipline. The aim was to develop interdisciplinary formats based on the literary text, therefore treating the literary event as a work of art in itself. In doing so, established event formats and roles within the literary scene were playfully and aesthetically challenged.

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CON_TEXT explored approaches that merge the production, presentation and reflection of the artwork. The literary artwork opens itself up to discourse and process – the reader is no longer presented with a finished, unchanging product or a fixed viewpoint, but rather a fragile, mutable creation of which they can become a part within the framework of a ‘text performance’. Production and presentation become one; the event draws closer to the art form of literature and its processual nature: literature becomes an occasion for communication, rather than a means of proclaiming a truth apodictically.

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Ten events in 2017 were jointly developed and staged by a literary author and an artist from another artistic discipline. A concluding three-day international conference involving artists and academics provided a forum for discussion that offered a theoretical reflection on the numerous practical examples: What is the relationship between the literary event and the text, and between the curator and the author? How can a literary event offer genuine aesthetic and discursive added value without undermining the artistic integrity of the texts? Does curating amount to a dispossession of the author? Is curating a form of translation? And what is the target language? What possibilities do analogue and digital means of text production and presentation open up for the literary event? Is everything ultimately “staging”? And if not: what language can the literary event devise that can assert the distinctiveness of the literary text whilst at the same time creatively reworking it, with a view to the aesthetic, living experience of literature?

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CON_TEXT draws in part on current developments in other art forms or in genuinely interdisciplinary art. Texts by visual or performing artists are often used in their works. The difference, however, is that artists who focus on literary texts and develop interdisciplinarity from a literary perspective are rarely given a platform. This is precisely where CON_TEXT came in.

Funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe